Schoolhouse is a minimalist studio and guest cottage located in Ghent, New York, designed by JG Neukomm Architecture. The brief began with a single question: what does a space for making look like when it is also a space for living? The answer sits atop a hill in the Hudson River valley, two perpendicular volumes in dark-stained wood whose gabled roofs borrow the silhouette of the local farmhouse vernacular while emptying that form of its agrarian function. The building reads as familiar from a distance and unfamiliar up close, a working studio dressed in the outline of a barn.
The two volumes are joined by a glass-sided gallery topped with a rooftop terrace. One holds a double-height studio with a three-sided mezzanine office; the other contains the kitchen and a loft-level bedroom. The connecting passage refuses a fixed role, working as lounge, dining room, or exhibition space depending on the day. A staircase in each volume lets the full sequence be walked continuously, so the plan folds back on itself without ever retracing a step. Circulation becomes a loop rather than a spine, which suits a life where the boundary between making and dwelling stays deliberately porous.
Ten minutes away in Spencertown sits Ellsworth Kelly’s Austin, the artist’s only building, and its influence runs underneath the whole project. What Neukomm draws from it is not form but priority: a structure organized around focused attention and the behavior of light rather than around program or display. Picture windows are placed to frame the fields and the distant ridgeline with precision, doubling as the primary light source and as a quiet instrument for marking time.
